


Solitude of Us

by Ironlawyer



Category: Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Civil War (Marvel), Imprisonment, M/M, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 13:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer
Summary: At the end of Civil War, Steve and the resistance take Tony captive. Steve and Tony have some talking to do.





	Solitude of Us

**Author's Note:**

> For Stony Bingo square ‘Interrogation’.
> 
> Thanks to Dap for the second pair of eyes :)

His fingers have been numb for a dangerously long time and the constant tingling pain as Extremis heals the chafing around his wrists is beginning to irritate him. He could break the rope easily enough and no doubt they know that, so the rope is there for more than just restraining his arms. A test, perhaps, to see how he might try to escape. It’s been three hours since he woke. Three hours of silence broken by the occasional hiss of voices that might be raised if they didn’t want to make sure he heard nothing. He wonders how long they’ll leave him if he doesn’t try to escape. How long they will bicker before someone comes to talk to him.

He paces the empty six foot by eight foot space - a walk in closet, with a battered wooden door with the inner handle removed. It’d hardly hold a scared child. Of course there’s a dozen super humans on the other side of the paper thin cell door and not one of them stupid enough to underestimate him. Any attempt to escape would fail and be used against him as evidence of his inability to cooperate. It doesn’t seem very Steve to play these kinds of minds games and he wonders whose idea it was to keep baiting him like this. So he sits on the floor in the far corner, arms pressed awkwardly against the wall and ears alert for the sound of footsteps. 

Sometime later he’s disturbed by the sound of deliberate heavy footsteps, like a toddler trying to make sure you know how angry they are. He sits in his spot and waits. The door swings open and Steve strides in without pause. He slams the door behind him and only then looks at Tony. Steve runs a hand through his still sweat streaked hair and leans against the door which creaks and buckles beneath his weight. The room fills with the smell of a hard won battle, the blood and smoke and sweat well ripened into his uniform.

Tony’s lips twitch with the Pavlovian instinct to smile, but he falters before it forms and it twists into something between a sneer and grimace. Steve looks at him with a brow furrowed halfway between deep thought and anger. ‘Brought you something.’ He pulls a chocolate bar from one of the pockets of his belt and throws it with more force than necessary for a six foot gap. It whacks Tony in the chest and falls to his feet.

‘Thanks.’

Steve grunts.

A moment passes. ‘Why am I here, Steve?’

‘Why _are_ you here?’

Tony wonders how he is supposed to answer that. Steve stares him down like he’s expecting something, an apology maybe, or a flippant remark he can get pissed at. Instead Tony twists away the crick in his neck and rolls his shoulders, this time he looks somewhere over Steve’s shoulder. ‘This won’t change anything, ’ Tony says. 

Steve crosses his arms. His face is carefully neutral, but the tension in his shoulders says he’s holding back a lecture, like Tony is the kid who always cheats on tests and Steve’s the teacher just waiting to catch him out again. ‘But it could, if you’ll let it.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘It is though. Where we lead others follow. When we stand together, we mean something.’

They could dance this dance a thousand times and still step on each other’s toes, but the futility of the fight doesn’t make it any easier to give up on, so he takes the bait. ‘We mean something, and that’s exactly why we need accountability.’

‘This isn’t accountability, it’s blackmail.’

‘Blackmail? We don’t let our cops or doctors run amok and if they do they’re subject to the law. If we want to be heroes, we need regulations. It’s fair, it’s right and it’s what everyone but you wants. Does justice mean whatever Steve Rogers thinks is right and screw what everyone else thinks? Because one man’s vision sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.’

Steve pushes away from the door, his fists visibly trembling and the slow hiss of his breath turning the closet into a sauna. ‘Don’t make this about me.’

‘There’s no resistance without you.’ 

‘Then that’s why they need me. Sometimes you have to do difficult things for what you believe in.’

Tony thinks of Happy. The way Pepper had looked at him at the funeral with an absent stare like he wasn’t worthy of seeing her grief or offering his comfort. She hadn’t said a word. ‘You think this is easy for me?’

‘Maybe it would be easier if you weren’t in the wrong.’

‘It’s not that black and white, Steve. It’s easy to say no compromises and hope and pray that everything will fall into place. Someone has to see beyond the ideology.’

‘We are not machines. You can’t assess real problems - real lives - like some sort of equation. You fight for what is right or you don’t. You used to make that choice too.’ Steve blinks slowly then stares blankly over Tony’s head. His arms fall to his sides like a sudden weight’s been passed to him and he can’t hold it up. ‘You’ve changed. I was right,’ he says but it sounds like a curse, ‘You’ve lost your humanity to that virus.’

Tony paints a carefully neutral look on his face with thirty years of practiced ease, while a tense coil of emotion is packed tightly below the surface. ‘I’ve never felt more human.’

Steve moves like a greyhound out the gate. He grabs Tony’s by the collar and yanks him to his feet, holding him up so his tiptoes barely graze the carpet. ‘Then why are you doing this?’ He speaks through clenched teeth, his jaw pale and trembling.

‘Because someone has to.’

Steve lets go and Tony falls to his knees. ‘Why? Why do you always need to be right?’ The words are Tony’s own given voice as clear as if he’d said them himself. A reflection of a question he has asked himself a thousand times since childhood and found a thousand different answers to. And yet, at the start of it all he never asked himself that about the SHRA. He did not need to be right, he simply was. As more time went on, as he pushed the boundaries of his own beliefs, more relationships sacrificed, more people dead and lives destroyed, it became a question of need again. Not the need to be right, but the need for it to mean something, for it to be worth it.

But Steve blunders on like the words mean nothing, like he is unaware of his ability to affect Tony in ways few others ever have. If there was one man in the world Tony would roll over and show his squidgy belly of self-doubt for it would be Steve, and the very fact he hasn’t, should be enough to tell Steve, of all people, how much more this is than that. ‘People have died,’ Steve says.

‘I know. This is a war.’

‘I haven’t killed anyone.’

Tony sees Cap with the shield held over him and wishes that he had. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m still a good man.'

‘So am I.’

‘Really?’

Silence.

Steve asks, ‘Is this really worth it?’

Tony wants to say _No_. He wants to see Steve smile again. Instead he says nothing. Steve too says nothing. He comes over and sinks to the floor next to Tony, close enough that Tony can feel the warmth at his shoulder and knee as if they were touching.

As they sit, Tony thinks that it could almost be like old times. He and Steve locked in a makeshift prison cell, some unseen enemy on the other side waiting to break them down or tear them apart. Steve would pace and Tony would think and when someone came through the door they would both be ready.

‘They want information, ' Steve says. 

For a moment, Tony thinks that ‘they’ are HYDRA or AIM or Victor Von Doom. ‘What?’

Steve won't look at him. ‘They think you can get us in 42.’

‘Why would I do that?’

Silence.

‘Oh.’

‘I can’t be around all the time.’

Tony laughs. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Completely. This is a war and they’re desperate. We both know what desperate men are capable of.’ Steve glances at the door. ‘Give them their reason, Tony. They’ll do it.’

‘You think that scares me?’ His whole adult life has been nothing but violence and war, physical pain comes to him as naturally as breathing.

‘No, but I had hoped.’ Cap can fill a stadium with his authority but in this tiny closet he seems withered – the vacuumed packed American hero.

He turns and looks Steve in the eye, a gentle, comforting smile curls his lips and he lets his shoulders square with the well-practiced confidence of the billionaire executive who’s faced boardrooms of would-be firings squads on a daily basis and followed them up with a helping of literal firing squads. ‘I’m not scared, Steve.’ He has never feared pain and still believes that his former allies are not capable of anything worse than the legions of supervillains he’s faced in the past. 

Despite that there is a bubbling chasm of fear lodged somewhere between his throat and his heart, a thick black tar clogging up his veins with the thought that anything his friends could do would be infinitely worse than everything some penny-dreadful, villain-of-the-week could do. The truth mingles with the lie, black and white paint swirled together until they are irreparably grey. He watches the way Steve’s eyes wrinkle at the edges and listens to the little click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth like the physical manifestation of the his thoughts ticking over and he knows that Steve knows. ‘But I am,’ Steve says, and then he closes his eyes, and leans in and his lips ghost over Tony’s, chaffed and dry and his breath is warm and unsteady against Tony’s face. Tony closes his eyes and doesn’t move. 

After barely a moment, Steve breaks contact with a sigh. Slowly Tony opens his eyes. He looks at Steve and sees what should’ve been obvious years ago. His lips search for words, but all he finds is, ‘Why?’

Steve’s adam’s apple quivers and he stares at the floor with his eyes tightly closed. ‘Sorry,’ he says.

It feels like Steve’s wedged a crowbar in the tightly sealed crate keeping his emotions in check and started to shimmy something loose. Something that not so long ago could’ve been something special but now it’s been left too long and it’s started to rot. ‘Yeah,’ he says and his voice cracks. ‘Me too.’

Steve finally looks at him. He stares for a moment then shakes his head and laughs. ‘We’re a pair of idiots, aren’t we?’

Tony smiles weakly. ‘Guess so.’ He shakes his head. ‘This can’t change anything.’

Steve grabs Tony’s wrist and stares into his eyes. ‘It could.’

And Tony thinks that maybe he’s right. So much of his adult life he’s been trying to be a better man and now he’s lost everyone he loves fighting a war he has no heart for. Lying awake at night trying to tell himself all the things he’s done are in their best interests or because he had no options or because the only alternative was so much worse. If he could just give up, if he could let the fight be someone else’s, maybe for a little while he could be happy. He could stand back and let thing play out without him. He and Steve could play the happy couple for a while and every moment would be tainted by the knowledge that he was betraying everything and everyone he cared about.

He looks at Steve’s hand where it is still tight around his wrist. He puts his hand over Steve’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘Maybe some people just aren’t meant to be together.’

Steve lets go. ‘Then what am I supposed to do?’

‘There is no supposed to. There’s only what you want.’

‘You don’t want this?’

‘Do you?’

Steve closes his eyes. After a moment he punches the wall. ‘Goddammit.’ He stands up, breathing heavily for a moment, then grabs the door and wrenches it open. ‘Then I want this.’ He walks away and slams the door.


End file.
